‘Smorking’ fun

My buddy Bucky* found this Japanese sign (L) with, “apologies if it has already been posted.” These “Smorking” signs are a Japanese classic that I swear the Japanese are put them up in conspicuous public places to entertain English speaking tourists.
For example, check out the results of using the search term “smorking” on flickrhivemind.net below ↓.

21 thoughts on “‘Smorking’ fun”

Peter Payne of J-List.com came up with this rather complete explanation of “smorking” engrish.

Needing a sixth sense to communicate with people from other countries… and all about “smorking”peterpayne.net (J-List side blog)
…”I hate it when someone smorks in my face.” For whatever reason, the English word “smoke” is often rendered as “smork” in Japan. The issue is how the Japanese perceive certain sounds, especially the “r” phoneme that’s not familiar to them. Because Japanese is a syllable-based language in which you can express sounds like ka, ki, ku, ke or ko, but not the consonant “k” by itself, English words like “hello” “goodbye” or “beer, please” must be forced through this rather alien phonetic system, resulting in haroh (the final “h” representing an elongating of the previous vowel), guddobai and biiru puriizu. The very first fast food I ate in Japan was a McDonald’s clone called First Kitchen (home of the world famous scrambled egg burger, yech), and I remember some confusion as to whether the company was First Kitchen or Fast Kitchen. Without the full repertoire of English sounds, the Japanese render the latter as fasuto and the former as fahsuto, with the longer middle vowel serving the role of the “r” in “first.” This rule gets over-generalized in some words, which is why the long middle sound of the word sumo-ku (smoke) ends up as “smork”…